Wednesday, January 30, 2013

of fish and words

The three new fish we had gotten for the tank have all died, but the 'koi' fish Nemo is still going strong. I wonder how depressed he will get now, though - start staring at the bottom of the tank again? Esmeism this morning: 'Mama, those birds, their color is you can't see them on the ground. That is their color. They are beautiful birds. Another: But not the 100, that is 80-20, not 80.. count to 80. Those are the ones that make my brain twist because she is almost right - and it isn't even something that would be expected from her, but how do I tell her the thought is correct, just the words that are off a bit? It has been easier to try to tell her that lately, sometimes Mama still misses, and then she gets frustrated. We've been playing Skyrim together for a few nights in a row - and I have been trying to pay attention to how she says things and suggest better words. She has been trying to use more numbers and time words, but they do sound strange when she tries - can I play this a little while few minutes please? etc. We have been working on saying 'as soon as' instead of 'as soon from', and other similar items. She asked me which of the two identical packages of candy on the table was the least of them - something I have been trying to explain - do (x task) at the very least, etc... A teacher's aide at school asked me if Esme had a brother - or a cousin she says is a brother. I told her Esme still thinks a 'brother' is any boy who plays with her - or in her game any male character who helps her. I've tried to explain brother before, even in movies and in real life situations - she still prefers her own definition. There are so many things she is steadfast about her own definition, but it is getting a little better over time. She has asked me on her map where all the family lives, and what color their houses are - and is trying to absorb that Mama has a brother and a sister she has not seen. How can I be the sister to my brother and have a sister, too?

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

more bits

Mark had written out the numbers 1-80 on a piece of paper in grid fashion for Esme when I was at work. She had kept it and was 'reading' it for several days. She can count to 100 now, based on remembering what was on the paper. However, she brought it to him yesterday (and told me about it after work) that the paper only counts to 64, because it is not the seven, that makes her brain hurt in here. He had accidentally written 67 for 65, and repeated 67 again where it should be. She had asked him to fix it because it made her brain hurt. I was talking to my mom on the phone while Esme was in the bathtub. My mom said she wanted to buy a remnant of carpet for her living room - I told her 12x8 was not a remnant, that was a piece. 12x2.5, like the piece of vinyl I had put under Esme's bed, was a remnant, but it was vinyl not carpet. Esme scowls at me and says 'Why you put that black thing under my bed? That is bad. Why you do that, Mama?' I had to explain to her what a remnant was... and I am not sure what she thought I had said. Her commenting on things in conversations is something she rarely does, but I am glad to actually hear her doing it more. After I hung up the phone she said she was bored now, because I was not calling, and talking - and she was sorry (she had been begging me to hang up the phone not long before that and I had said no, but then mom did have to go). We have been playing dragon game for a bit this morning, but now she is outside with an umbrella parading around the porch in the warmest weather we've had in a week. I called the principal of the school she will probably attend. The meeting is next week.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

tiny bits

When I came home tonight Esme had six pieces of a nine piece puzzle in her room and put together - asking me where the other pieces were. I thought it had all been thrown away a long time ago - she has had so little interest in puzzles. She had mentioned 'the puzzle game' she needed help with a few days ago, but I had not seen it then. This morning she had said 'My shoe, I leave it early', when 'I left it there earlier' would have been more correct. 'As soon from we get from upstairs', instead of 'As soon as we get upstairs.' She had a harder time with that correction. She has been trying to use more time words 'early', 'later', 'soon', 'ten minutes', 'what time is it - is it eight?' (no matter what the clock says), 'that was a long time', 'will it be long time, two minutes?' etc etc.. She can still read the clock by 'it is the seven and the six' etc, but I am not sure she understands what it really means. Really confused me when she said the clock was 'nothing' the other day. It was 7:40, and both of the hands were on top of each other. She said the clock was 'white and now it is nothing, what time is nothing?' I think my brain spit up on that one.. she was right, in a way... but .. wow. Mark says - 'see what's there, that's my girl.' Mark said he asked her to watch for '12:30' on the digital clock to know when her fish sticks would be done today, and when he asked her to look again she said '1, 2, 3, 3 -- oh no, the food is burning!' So, maybe she does understand at least what is more and what is less?

Thursday, January 24, 2013

knitting project progress

A few pictures of works in progress.

Gray wool gloves in worsted weight yarn



They fit, and there is no pattern, just working from bottom up on my own hands like I have done before.





The bed size afghan is making progress - will be done in another few hours worth of work. Each row still takes 10 to 15 minutes.
We are probably headed off to town in a little bit. Esme has been playing my computer quite a bit. I moved a LOT of pictures off of the desktop so her games would be easier to find. However, she thought she had done something wrong. She asked me this morning where the games, so many games, and now they are not, had went. She counted her fingers out and then took the tips of them 'away' off into the air by pretend. She said they were not in the trash can, she was not remembering what those games were, could I help her find them etc... I understood what she meant (Even though I was half asleep during this) and was able to tell her she hadn't done anything wrong and it was just pictures I had put away. Oh. They were not the games. But I put the sims word into the place of games and it does not - what word is it - the sims game? She has been trying to type words into the browser location bar and get Daddy's Skyrim game (typing dragon) and my sims game by doing that - because it works for pbskids and nickjr it should work for them, right?

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

kindergarten meeting coming up

I am doing a major housecleaning, which is how I try to get my mind off dwelling on things.  They scheduled Esme's IEP meeting at the school for a few weeks from now - and they have acknowledged she has made great progress since last January, but there are still things to work on (of course we know this).  And she is still pulling the same 'too scared' or 'too small' to do things - one of the aides told me she does not try hard on her work because she wants to play so badly and she gets a bad attitude with them. Our girl - yes.. our stubborn girl.  We recognize this, too.  The gym and toys and computers and electronics and the thrill of having all of these children to play with it all with -- she craves that and is not adverse to telling us that she is annoyed (but she doesn't use those words) that it has to end for the day.

Maybe Kindergarten will be better.  She will go into a regular class and get some pull outs to work on her language.  The meeting is to set up exactly what we want to accomplish and how they will do it, and put it into writing again, like last time.  The things she has made great progress on is 1.) using words and learning new ones, 2.) asking questions, 3.) (some) using names, 4.) using and understanding words for spatial things like left/right/up/down/over/under.  She doesn't think things like pronouns or categories (clothes, animals, letters, foods) are that important - especially when she wants to do something else.  She can use them, understand them etc.. but often just doesn't and doesn't understand what the big deal is.  Another progress - sometimes she corrects herself, slows down to repeat something, or tries to work around things she can't quite say in helpful ways instead of throwing a fit or being frustrated.  She can express many of her real worries and fears now, but her overexaggeration and tendencies to want to get her own way are starting to be difficult -- her the cat hurt my bone and it is broken to express a pinprick scratch or saying she is too scared to go in the house because she wants to play in the water.. or scared of chapstick because she usually doesn't use it so it must be terrible ... *mama wants to hang her head in her hands sometimes at those but we power through*  Some if it is five, some of it is just Esme herself... and I am uncertain whether to be harder on those or softer - make compromises or try to prepare her for 'real world' treatment... it is a case by case basis etc.

I have today and tomorrow off.  Esme is at Grandma's.  I've been reading a lot of information lately trying to put something together in my head - physics, math, astronomy.... we are thinking of making an open air observatory and I am working up some plans for it.  I already sort of use that place on the property to do that - but have no records or anything to use to sight by... it would be nice to have something to make notations by.  I wonder what Esme will be when she is five years older ... but then, she could do the same.  What kind of parents do I have that they are doing this weird stuff no one else does? ie: sew clothes, write computer programs, design astronomical landscape markers....ie redneck stonehenges.. 

Friday, January 18, 2013

bits of goldfish and toilet physics

We got three new goldfish today - don't worry, Nemo is still alive.  Esme named the new fish Treasure and Bubble, and I named the last one Angel for her shape.  Nemo seemed much happier to have friends - he had been staring at the mirror surface at the bottom of the tank the past few days.  Besides that, I've worked a new strip into the quilt top over the course of the day.  Esme has been working on her math, adding single numerals together, and trying to count to higher numbers.  There were forty squares in my quilt strip and she got to thirty and that was a test for her - she did a good job.  Mark has been helping me reinforce the 'before' and 'after' numbers, simple addition questions etc, and he also wrote down numbers for her on a list and she tried to name off numbers from their written numerals.  Esme said it is the secret question, what is it, with three and three etc.. very interesting way of phrasing it.  I've ordered two new books for her homeschool - one on volcanoes and earthquakes that I picked out and another on jungle caves that she picked out from the list before I really had a good chance to look at them all -- she was insistent, it looked halfway decent, so I said yes.

The other thing I want to remember is that Esme has been playing with her projector toy all by herself for the past few days - including changing the cartridges.  She told me the battery bad noise was happening and I tried to show her how to snap them in correctly - and she brought the projector into her room in her bed and put up a piece of paper at the end of her bed on a box so she could watch them there... quite a good job, and it gave me some nice time this morning to sit and examine what to do with my spoonflower fabric in the quilt pattern.

Toilet physics - oh yes... we took apart the Mainstream we have and were discussing the engineering drawings on AmStd's website and comparing trap heights and other bits to see where the errors in flushing may be coming from.  I have hacked up a fix that will involve a new toilet fill valve and a piece of vinyl tube tomorrow - to see how that changes the mechanism.  That is one of the reasons for buying that model last year - everything in it is standard and thus hackable at the same time.

No goldfish were hurt during the making of this post.  In fact, they are all quite happy.  The new three are calico fantails, and one of them gave the lady at the pet shop such a run for her money that it got out of the net she was using once in the air and back into the tank.  We should have named that one Tiger - but it is Bubble.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Esme quotes - language development

The other night when I got home from work Esme was so proud her hair was getting brown like mine - she would not have yellow hair any longer, and she would NOT have black hair, like Daddy.  Her hair would be brown, and that is the best idea.  *haha*  I told her when she is twelve or thirteen years old she would want it to be blonde again, to be colored yellow again.  She said NO, she was five years old, five - see?  And she is a brave girl.  That was her answer to that.

This morning I was pouring up my coffee and calling to her to get out of the tub and get her towel.  She said something on the order of 'don't say that thing with no eyes'.  Then I walked around the corner and realized she was already in process of doing what I had asked and was mad because I was asking without looking at her first.  She asked me 'the words to say well, how does it say the words?' which was pretty excellent.  We discussed she could say she was already doing that - and for me to come look.  But, that was a hard concept for ME to translate into 'English' from her initial description.

Mark had to cut out a small section underneath her hair for school - and she was very upset that school was closed today after she had done all of that with the tiny holes in her hair and the washing etc....  She did not want me to go to work today because of the ice, told me I needed to call in and tell them it was dangerous.  I had told her last night she could have school with us at home and look at books and learn things but she was not agreeing that school could be at home... we will work on that idea, because we are still wondering about that ourselves and have been talking about what she might be interested enough in to learn about with us at home.

We talked a lot about bats, and caves, and also rivers, volcanoes, mountains and a few new things like crystals, radar, and cliffs.  Some of that soaked in and I will try to cover some more in a few more days.  We talked about the volcano and she asked where it was - was it in Africa.  I said no, it was in Italy.  She asked if Italy was in Africa.  I got a map and showed her where Italy was, and where Africa was, and she already knows where we live - in Tennessee - and where on North America that is, but she thinks the entire continent is Tennessee unless otherwise labelled.  She can count to thirty now, but when Daddy asked her to count to three million she counted '1, 2, 3, million.  there.'  She has told me before that the numbers make children bored, and the brain wants to sleep.  She is 'bored by so many corns' on her plate because they are so many numbers. She has asked me to spell lots of words by asking 'what are the letters give in for marshmallow' or 'h starts with what for horse?' etc.

I brought chips home from the store today and she said those were not her cheetos.  She had written Cheeto on the shopping list the other day.  We have achieved success on getting her to call gummy bears 'gelatinized ursines'.  We are awful on that one, but it is funny, and I think she should learn there are more than one way to say things - which is a lesson I think is sinking in, and all for the better,  I told her I had brought those from the store and a few minutes ago she wanted to go get a package of 'ursines' and Daddy told her the gummy bears were down on the table and she said it wasn't right.  He told her gelatinized ursines were gummy bears and she thought and remembered, then said 'oh yea, right' and agreed.  What is really cool - is she can say that now, and say it well. :)  'I said something in a foreign language the other day and she looked at me and said 'Mama, you are Dora?'in an awe-filled way.  That made me laugh!

Monday, January 14, 2013

bits

No pictures, but Esme got her fish yesterday.  There was some confusion at the store whether it was a plain goldfish or a koi fish... but it was the only one they had as well, so she got him.  He is in a 14 by 14 tank and seems happy today.  He is calico colored and does have mouth whiskers - and Esme says he is pretty and has been talking to him often, so far that is a win.

We brought Grandma her present - Esme picked which paper out of a wallpaper book I have to wrap the can in to make it pretty :) 

Not much else, I made her a pair of pants after going through all of her recent clothes again, and knitted some on the bed afghan, which is slowly making its way to done, maybe within this month.  ha. 

Esme quote, hours after I gave her apples and milk and bologna.  'Mama, my brain is full - it is full.  But my heart, it is not full - the straws in my heart are not full and they are empty and I need food.'  OK.  We looked in the fridge and had chicken noodle soup leftovers, bread and more juice.  She ate all of that - noisily - and was very happy.  This morning we had more talk about the straws in her heart - to which I told her it was her stomach, not her heart - needing drink cups after children sleeping they need to fill their straws.  ??

Friday, January 11, 2013

last day of vacation

We made a playdate at the park today and Esme had a lot of fun playing.  She did have a large upset about going for food when she swore she wasn't hungry - the other girl was.  She said three times she did not want french fries, only strawberry ice cream - no french fries, she was full of them.  Then, of course, after she only got a strawberry milkshake and nothing else - she threw a banshee wail about no french fries.  But I did not give in under pressure - she chose and should learn about it.  It's not like she hasn't had to choose just one before, and she had the other girl chanting she wanted french fries too -  when she actually did have tater tots in front of her.     We went back to the park without the other girl and her mom and watched some people fish and another girl came who was very talkative.  When it was time to leave to go home Esme argued more that I was making her sad and should stop that and we discussed how a good attitude makes Mom want to take her next time much more than a crying fit.

She is still being annoying and arguing with us here and there.   She has been explained three times at the very least and insisted she understands that the aquarium needs to sit for a few days without fish but she also still wants to go buy fish now.   She was insisting I am the one being annoying to her, not the other way around.   I know I'm 'hard on her' sometimes - like taking her 'no french fries' and standing with it instead of giving in and buying some when she cries.  But, I feel that is a lesson worth learning.

Esme quotes: Our car is smelling the other car, to find it, and go that way, and find the food, is it smelling it?  (after I told her I was following the other vehicle to find the restaurant)

We passed by a sheriff's car with flashing lights that was marking a funeral.  Esme asked if the person was going to become a zombie.  


Thursday, January 10, 2013

bit o this, jumper that

Today is our anniversary, and we had a nice day yesterday which was good, as the rain is much harder today out there.  We are very happy for six years together and the home and family we have built together.  Mark says this year will mark twenty years of him living in Tennessee.. and he likes the way it has turned out these past few years very much.  So do I, it will be eight years for me?  I came down in 2005 from Fargo, maybe with a visit in late 2004.  We will see if we will do the library today under umbrellas.. I did promise Esme I would and it might be a day I could get behind piling up a few books and letting her do her thing while I go through a stack.  If I bring a notebook, much more the case, probably.


 
The recycled shirt jumper and a bird painting I was inspired out of a magazine picture
I made two jumpers yesterday - as the one she had worn to school twice was very handy.  I had to put the buttonhole on a sewn-on band as the necks were too tight to button straight.  But, they used up scraps and one of them was actually recycled out of a shirt that would not fit me from the thrift store.  They will be useful for quite a while that way and she likes them over long sleeved tshirts now, which is a change from days when we could never weasel her into one without a banshee fight.  Daddy said she washed her hair for school very very well the other day, too - very little fighting.  Our little girl may be gaining a bit of wisdom there, maybe?

Esme quotes:  
I was eating all day, and now I am done, and I'm playing with Mom and my brain is bored, it is so bored, it is laying on the table, and it is sleeping - and my brain is bored, like that, its on that table. (as she carries her half-full plate down to the kitchen from the eating area)

She sang me the 'Jerry Fairy' song - which I could not understand the name of, and she was getting mad - but then I convinced her to sing it further and it was the months of the year, the 'January February song'.  She was going at them 100 miles per second, I only caught a few of them in full.  Less than ten minutes later, she sang it all at normal speed for Daddy and it was perfect.  We were very proud of her.   She has named that pink polka dotted dolly from Christmas 'January' for the moment.. as she needed to have a name and I wouldn't give her one.  'Coming up with' names makes her think, so does drawing - she wants to give up, but she can do it if she doesn't try to hide behind 'I'm too small', which is a frequent cop-out. 

We went to a pet store in Paris yesterday, and she saw fish, lizards, frogs, snakes, a spider and a flying squirrel.  She was most impressed with the fish - stared at every tank for so long.. and watched Daddy handling the albino corn snake with a nervous giggle and five feet of distance, then told him he had done so well with the beautiful snake with the beautiful tongue.  We are thinking of making up a fish tank again, we had one she loved to watch when she was less than 3.  Grandma, she will be telling you about the snakes - I am sure!  She wanted to tell you about them on the phone then.

We played with the markers yesterday at my request.  She did a drawing of herself with a line for legs/hips and ten marks underneath it to be all ten toes.  She drew the same figure climbing a ladder to her really big slide she dreams of.  She drew much more complete figures months ago, but she was more interested in drawing then, and I think she is taking shortcuts.  The ten toes had to be accurate, though - she counted each line to make sure they were there.

Later : She had a great day out with me to library and McDonalds.  She talked to a lot of kids and also to the librarian - I had to tell this same child to calm down and quiet down when months ago she covered her ears and cried at the singing.  She gave a pretty decent run down to the library bookstore lady about what we had done and what we were going to do - but she didn't remember the name of the place we were going to and said 'children don't know the everythings, children don't do that.'  It was cool to talk with her when we were alone at the restaurant about jobs, what she wanted to do when she grows up (feed dogs, and clean the floor because they get messy), what 'country' music is (the farmer songs? she asked and pointed up) and when each song changed how it was different and many other things.  Another girl from the library showed up and she slowly acquired a posse of little girls to run and screech with, yet after a one minute warning she was ready to say thank you for playing with me and go home with me.  She did call me a super monster mama.. but said she loved me and she was happy we went all the places.  She took a bath when she got home and still talked about some of it.   She told Grandma on the phone we had went to McDonalds and the library and it was very easy to understand.  We are cleaning out an old aquarium now because she is still interested in having fish - and we think a goldfish or two may be okay.

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Esme painting and birdhouses

Esme's birdhouses and a painting she did afterwards.  I made the 'petals' on the flower to show her something with the brush and then she went on and did the rest.  The figure is her with long yellow hair and a dress, being like a flower.  This was with the same 'bad' brush that looks like a birds foot and does not have a point to it.  I will dig around trying to find her a better small brush in my collection to use, because she wants to get more detail out of it than I thought she was going to try for. *Mama should have known*

She is at school for a few hours.  She has been playing NickJr. on my computer following a request for a hippo game.  We talked about what hippos eat, and she said a man with the hat in the air told her it was only grass - but he was not on tv, maybe he was on the computer - she couldn't think of where he was.  I thought they ate fish and grass - but she is right, they are almost entirely vegetation eaters, with some chances to eat carrion and other meat when they are stressed, but not really 'built' for that.  We learn new things every day - Daddy says they also have pink milk that has a sunscreen chemical in it and it is dangerous to humans.  He saw an article on that recently - so learning really new things!

I begin my three day vacation today.  I have a few little sewing things that should be done but other than that and a trip to the library for Esme tomorrow we are thinking to take it easy.  Tomorrow is our six year anniversary - six years since Mark came to get me in the coffee shop in Paris that morning... and we both agree it has been a wonderful and with Esme, adventuresome, six years

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Painting lessons


We bought one birdhouse at the store and she painted it pink.  Daddy had this other one and swapped it on her once - she didn't seem to realize it wasn't hers -- and then he swapped it back.  She painted hers for a while, then said to us - 'but it had a black on it and a string, did you do it, you or you?'  And then she knew it was Daddy.  We thought she was just going to ignore it happened and not say anything at all...  Can't quite pull the wool over her eyes anymore... ha

Daddy said we could paint on this one more and let the pink one dry for tomorrow.
 She watches me paint a bird on this side of the house after we discussed stripes and dots on the roof.

 I watch while she paints her version of the bird on the opposite side.
Mark says it is the next Picasso giving lessons to the next next Picasso.  Ha.


My 'Really, you think so?' expression was hard to hide at this moment, I guess. 
But she wasn't doing a bad job, at all, working with confined space on her side and the brush was not a good one so making anything was pretty impressive.

Her attempt at making the bird (from memory, I will add, she did not look at it again), and putting a white eye on it in the middle.

Esme question tonight:  'Who is winter?  Sun or Moon.  You pick one.'  So, we had a lesson... which ended with her deciding that winter is when it gets cold and dark, and then cold and warm.  *work on that a bit more*

indigo 1.5 yards


1.5 yards of indigo fabric makes two pillowcases
They needed a freshening up - so this was a nice project for today.
Esme clowning around because I have the camera, and now she is outside stomping around on the porch and trying to help Daddy with yardwork.


Unplanned, but they go quite well with the yellow pillow.
 

A little fabric marking tag to show which one of them goes on the bigger pillow.
 
Yesterday I did some repair work on some upholstered furniture for someone - cutting and sewing patches from extra fabric to repair tears and holes.  That used a lot of pattern matching and color sense, and they could barely see the difference after it was repaired in several places.  Not a bad job to take on - and it helped them out.  Sewing this little applique on is nothing compared to appliqueing velvet upholstery canvas around covered buttons and trying to follow the curve of a sofa arm! 
 
Esme said we needed to cook something in the oven with all the ingredients - not fish sticks, they don't have ingredients.  So, we made a carrot cake into cupcakes.  We'll see how it turns out as the mix was one Grandma had given us a good while back.  
 
I did the laundry and handed Esme each of her things to describe, and she got it all right until she got to her sheet.  She said 'what's that - I don't hear that word - is shaped like blanket, what is not?'  So I had to explain what sheets were again... and we went and put everything in her room.  I found out how all the socks end up back in the hamper each time.  As she puts all of her clothes up on her dresser she knocks them off the top of the pile instead of putting them in the sock pouch on the wall -- and she didn't even notice until I asked her where the socks went... and then she picked them all up back into the pouch.  Hmm...  She dropped a cookie on the floor downstairs the other day and put her foot over it so I wouldn't see she had dropped it.  She is getting some bad ideas, there!
Lots of other little projects going on - a patchwork 'lone star' type diamond thing I am working on, still the bed size afghan (made quite a bit of progress on that), a journal I covered with a pretty wallpaper sample, some dishcloths for a coworker's wife... I have no shortage of things to do.

bits

We were given a discussion yesterday about a 'human' Esme saw at the park one day back in November.  It went like this.  'A ladybug, in the park.'  Huh? 'A ladybug in the park, it had two spots, but I did not see it.'  Oh, I remember that, I was knitting, like I'm knitting now, and you came to see the ladybug, but it flew away.  'Yea, the boy and the girl, they would not play, with me, they would not play.  And I go slide, and run, and they did play, and then I saw the human!'  Huh? What human, which one? 'The human who grows, and is tall, and he plays with me!'  The girl who had the doll? (there was a handicapped girl with a doll who was very tall who tried to show Esme her doll)  NO, the human who was tall, and growing up, and he plays with me, and he has a yellow shirt, and he runs.  'Oh, the teenaged girl with the yellow shirt, that was a girl a 'her' - she did play with you.  'And we run, and he said 'I will play with you' and I hit my head, and he said 'Are you alright"' and I said 'Yes' and we run.

*our girl is from planet 9?*

This morning I was brushing her hair and she says 'you are putting holes in my hair'.  I said I was not, and she did not look like Marge on the Simpsons with holes in her hair.  She says 'NO, tiny holes, they are small, and they have trees in them, and they grow tall'  You have no trees growing in your hair, and no holes.  'They are tiny holes, and the animals, the tiny animals, the bugs, they climb up and (scout hand over eyes sign) and they see.'  You mean the South Park episode (which we haven't seen in six months or more) with the bugs - those were lice - you do not have bugs in your hair, I would know.  'No, they are really really tiny, so tiny you cannot see them, and they live in holes.'  No, you have no bugs in your hair, we would know (and she doesn't).

Almost every conversation is an adventure... 

Thursday, January 03, 2013

Hexagons

hexagon kitchen cloths
click here to buy in the shop

I made these up yesterday using an equilateral triangle as the base piece.  They will be helpful little bowl holding cloths, 'napkins' to put in my lunchbox and so forth.  They are backed with muslin and have overstitching along the seams.  Many of the scraps came from recycled things and from bits saved in bags that were leftover from projects.

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

new hat and computer commands

 Playing computer, copying commands from a sheet I wrote them down for her on.
I made the hat as a copy of a green one I keep wearing to work - and it helps for her to have a warm hat too, when she will wear it.  She likes this color.

 copying the gamemode commands so she can fly or eat food, of which she cannot do both at the same time without changing over -- and I knew she could do it herself.  I thought maybe having to type it all out though will have her think a bit harder before wanting to switch so much ;)  And, that seems to be working.


gelling out with a popscile, a cat and warm yarn things on the bed.
I am tying up the ends of the new blanket before continuing for the last foot or so.  It is coming slowly but surely.

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

well it's here

Long contemplative moments this morning before anyone else was really truly awake.  I played Vivaldi.  Esme woke up about halfway through the disc (which involved other classical, too), and came upstairs saying her ears hurt with the music.  That makes me sad - as she plays noisy computer music all day - but can't stand great pieces.. or anything really that isn't a cartoon.. on the overhead speakers.  It was nowhere as loud as Daddy plays his music at times - she just has his supersonic ears mixed with something else - that dislikes classical.  I like the innate geometry in it - I see it in my mind - it was nice for contemplating the sunlight struggling through the mist, the air currents that are barely visible to me only when filtered through a sunbeam and all of the tiny fibrillation movement in the branches outside my window.  I tried to do so without the music and it did not last long before her noisy game was breaking my concentration.  So it is as it does. Before long, she is off to her room to make Krabby Patties for my little ponies... and Mark is up and bustling with the pork roast he put in the oven the night before.  And I have the day off - no work... but what I will do is not making itself apparent.  I'm in a thinking mood.

Beyond the contemplative moment - there is a new year stretched out before us.  And all I know with certainty is that I want to be productive, and would like it to be a little warmer than it is right now... and to try to reduce the clutter both in my mind and in my workspace.  This swirling air around me is full of time and possibilities that may or may not come to be.  The clutter I spoke of in my mind before - audiovisual noise from hours past - spikes happily now with orange and yellow violins from Vivaldi... it is a nice echo to have.

I sit at my workstation and sort out fluff and dander - attempting to find something to inspire me.  I have projects started all over, and one or more of them could have time spent upon them...   Little one returns now with apple jack pony recently escaped from some catastrophe of pretend.. and making more sandwiches at my elbow.